Tampa Calling

Twitter may be the hottest thing in social networking at the moment, but count NIN mastermind Trent Reznor as a recent convert to the naysayers.

According to Rolling Stone, Reznor “recently contributed a post to the official NIN.com message board in which he confesses his disappointment in the overall negativity of online communities, writing, ‘We’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience..’”

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Last night, right before we watched the new Big Lebowski double-DVD set, my brother Joel informed me that Aaron Neville didn’t make Rolling Stone’s list of Top 100 Singers.

I told Joel that’s crazy, the Crescent City big man with the angelic voice had to have made the cut.

And then I took a look for myself this morning. Goddamn, no Neville! I’m outraged.

Few singers have made me dry my eyes. Neville is one of them. I’ve heard him to do Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” twice in concert. Manly tears both times.

Photo of Aaron Neville at New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 2008 by Wade Tatangelo.

Aaron Neville: “A Change is Gonna Come”

It’s official. The most highly anticipated release in modern rock history, Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy, has finally arrived.

RollingStone.com has run a 4-star review. Here’s the opening ‘graph:

Let’s get right to it: The first Guns n’ Roses album of new, original songs since the first Bush administration is a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record. In other words, it sounds a lot like the Guns n’ Roses you know. At times, it’s the clenched-fist five that made 1987’s perfect storm, Appetite for Destruction; more often, it’s the one sprawled across the maxed-out CDs of 1991’s Use Your Illusion I and II, but here compressed into a convulsive single disc of supershred guitars, orchestral fanfares, hip-hop electronics, metallic tabernacle choirs and Axl Rose’s still-virile, rusted-siren singing.

Read entire review.

It was with mixed emotions that I pulled the new Rolling Stone magazine from my mailbox on Thursday. On one hand, it pleased me to see Barack Obama’s smiling face on the cover. On the other, it saddened me to see the mag, the one I have read more often than any other during my lifetime, had shrunk. The larger format had stood for four decades. I have a hard time throwing away periodicals and have boxes of the large format RS’s dating back to last decade tucked away in my closet. On slow nights, I still peruse them.

“The adoption of a standard format could boost single-copy sales and reduce production costs for advertising inserts such as scent strips and tear-out postcards,” reports the AP (which also offers comparative pics of the old and new formats). “The magazine says any cost savings, though, will be offset by the inclusion of more pages and the shift to thicker, glossier paper.”

Rolling Stone boss man and founder devoted a page to explaining the move.

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